The Unsung Style of Orson Welles

Orson Welles could never be ordinary. His own wife, Rita Hayworth, described him after their marriage had dissolved as "a genius, crazy like a horse, and a marvelous man, completely unaware of reality." (That was a typical assessment: All praise of Welles was somehow invariably laced with derision.) He was a superstar and a renegade, a stage actor who made a name for himself on the radio before barging, more notoriously than successfully, into the world of film—a medium that would never be the same after the emergence of his debut, Citizen Kane.

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Welles lived life with vigor, touring the globe and enraging his bosses, and even when putting a film together became so laborious that he could hardly manage to see a project through to completion, he still found time to enjoy himself to the fullest. He was enamored of the world and its manifold pleasures, and he was always seeking out new experiences: in the days after production wrapped on The Magnificent Ambersons, he went South to the shoot a documentary about the Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, spending his time soaking up the flavor of Brazil while, unbeknownst to him at the time, the studio was mangling his just-finished feature in the editing room back home. One thing you can say about Welles is that despite his artistic success, he was never a man of good luck.

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Today Welles isn't remembered as an icon of style in quite the same way that, say, Humphrey Bogart is, but maybe that's only because time has been so unkind to his legacy. (People tend to think of him more as a wine salesman than a director struggling to finish his final masterpiece, The Other Side of the Wind, which still hasn't seen the light of day.) But to look back at photographs of Welles gallavanting with his wife or working behind the scenes is to see a man who lived on the edge of style as much as he did the cinema—far from the buttoned-down image of the average Hollywood director, Welles is the very picture of cool.

His approach to fashion isn't far removed from his approach to work. He could and often would don a suit and tie to impress upon the studio executives a sense of himself as the ultimate professional. But elsewhere his look is effortless and casual: he rocked lightweight white and tan summer suiting (inspired, perhaps, by his time in Brazil); he was one of the first to pair a T-shirt with a blazer; and, in one of my favorite touches, decked himself out in nautical stripes as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Maybe this freewheeling fashion sense was a product of his self-image: he knew he'd never look the part of the ultra-trim Hollywood sex symbol, so he felt free to throw himself into whatever arrangement of clothes struck him as interesting.

He didn't care about having the perfect figure because he had something better: he had confidence. Just look at how Welles marches through the set of one of his best films, Othello—a new restoration of which opened theatrically in New York on April 25th from Carlotta Films and will have various showings at select theaters nationwide throughout the months of May and June—clothes perfectly imperfect, cigar and coffee in hand, topped off with the ideal pair of sunglasses. The guy couldn't look cooler if he tried. How much he cared is hard to say. But the results speak for themselves: as in all aspects of life, nobody dressed quite like Orson Welles.

For more information on showings of the restored version of Othello, click here.